Pamphlets, brochures, books, magazines, newsletters, mailers and other similar materials (collectively referred to as booklets) have conventionally been bound by staple:s, saddle stitches and other conventional binding techniques. Each sheet of the booklet is typically the width of two booklet pages. Printing text on the front and back of a sheet allows each sheet to serve as four printed pages of the booklet. The printed sheets are collated and assembled. The assembly of sheets are bound with staples or stitching and folded into a booklet.
Book binding is expensive. Traditional books are bound with elaborate stitching in the spine of a hard backed book covers. Less expensive techniques, such as stapling, have been developed. For example, magazines are stapled instead of being stitched. However, even these less expensive binding techniques are prohibitively expensive for certain applications, such as high volume mailers.
Promotional mailers, multipage invoices and other similar materials are produced at extraordinarily low costs. High speed document handling devices cut, fold and seal paper rolls and sheets to produce such mailers and similar materials. There has been a long felt need for a method to bind these low-cost materials together into booklets. Stapling and other traditional. binding techniques have proven to be expensive and difficult. For example, stapling devices tend to breakdown and staples add weight to the booklet and increase the postage cost of the mailer. Accordingly, the need for very low cost binding methods was left unsatisfied until the current invention.